A Good Morning to Be

I awoke to the first cool morning of the season...58 degrees and the Ridge is shrouded in mist. We stretch and rise, anxious to enter the sanctity of the woods...to breathe and hear what the creatures have to say. The pileated woodpecker is rat-a-tat-tatting in the distance...a cliche runs through my foggy head about early birds...I chase it away.

I'm grateful to have finished most of my chores last night, leaving more play time for this morning before the guests arrive at 9:00. There is one thing to do...take the park bench to the lake. With it's freshly sanded and re-sealed wood planks, it's anxious to return to its post of respite for the weary. Bench is reunited with dam, lake, iron weed, spider webs, dew on the grass. I can now turn my senses over to what is before me.

The lake is reacting to the coolness much like we are...swirling, dancing, rising to touch the blue of morning. It's surface is covered in boiling mist, moving clockwise, but also toward the center of the lake. Fragile ballerinas spin 'round and t'ward each other until they commingle into one plume of swirling mist thrust upward into the open air, into the space where the trees surrender to the sky.